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Does my site have a Penguin or Panda penalty? If so, why? How can you tell?

I have a friend who's website http://www.solidplastering.co.uk I run for him as a favour. Back in October 2012, it was ranking well on the first page for "plasterer surrey" which is county (state) he works in. Life was good and he was very busy.

It definitely got hit I believe on the EMD update as "solid plastering" is a type of plastering (and I wonder whether this could still have a hold over the site).

Since then, I have tried everything I can think of to tidy up the site, and now it has 25 pages of unique content. There are no broken links, nothing in Webmaster Tools in the HTML improvements section.I have seen other plasterers with the same text on every town page rank higher!

I noted that there were some links in "Links to Your Site" that I couldn't verify and didn't look very useful. They certainly weren't put there by the website owner so I disavowed them having tried to get them removed first.

Despite trying everything I can think of, the site still only ranks for about 2 phrases e.g "plasterer oxshott" in UK

Every other phrases e.g plasterer [Town] is outside the top 100.

What I also find strange is that if you search for relatively unique text on the page e.g.

"Our plasterers pride themselves" "We have helped many people restore" "The customer always comes first for"

Then without fail his listing will be the bottom of the pile, below spammy directory sites and completely unrelated real estate/property websites.

So question is does this behaviour of having your listings in last place indicate a penalty (there is nothing in Webmaster Tools) and if so, which penalty could it be?

I have exhausted all possibilities. Should I close down the site? Should I contact Google?

8 Responses

Using the Chartelligence tip on my Analytics reprot, I can see that there is no real "cliff-face" drop as such corresponding with any of the dates that are overlay, its more of a progressive drop (please see attached image).

I take the point about Penguin that some of the links are not great, and yes, I did remove some of the links myself and have disavowed 8 I can't.

But 1 of the links mentioned above is from a UK directory and 1 is from a friend of his painter/decorator site and they recommend each other. What is the best way of doing this - a "Our Partners" page?

I guess the thing that I would like to know still is:-

1) Does a penalty mean that you can rank number 1 for 1 town but nowhere to be seen for others? e.g. a penalty per page

2) Why does any of the unique content that was written by a professional copywriter get pushed to the bottom of the Google SERPs - is that a penalty at work? Some of the sites that appear above are completely irrelevant.

3) Having disavowed some links and only 25 pages of unique content, when do you decide to give up on the domain, or should I approach Google next for feedback?

The problem here is that all we can really give is generalized advice. If you start applying Penguin advice to the site when really you have a Panda issue (or vice versa), or something else is going on then you may not help the problem at all. It's probably going to take a few hours of digging to determine how best to advise you.

If you'd like, I can put you in touch with someone who can take a thorough look at your site and give you a good idea as to what kind of problems you are dealing with.

I'll briefly answer this point though:

But 1 of the links mentioned above is from a UK directory and 1 is from a friend of his painter/decorator site and they recommend each other. What is the best way of doing this - a "Our Partners" page?

To me those directories look like ones created solely for the intention of building links to your site. There's no editorial process to go through and it's very unlikely that those links would send you traffic. My opinion is that it is an unnatural link...but then that's just my opinion.

Regarding partner pages, part of the "link schemes" section of the quality guidelines says that it is a link scheme to create partner pages for the purpose of cross linking (you link to me and I'll link to you.) It's certainly possible that that link is not causing you a problem. But, if I were dealing with a Penguin hit site, it's a link I would want nofollowed, or at the very least make sure that the anchor text is not a keyword.

Thanks Egol for the kind words. I had a quick look and here are my thoughts. It certainly sounds like there is an algorithm that is not treating your site favorably considering you are not ranking in the top 100 for many phrases.

The EMD update was Sep 28, 2012, but really the sites that got affected at that time were sites with almost no content that only ranked because of their domain name. I'm talking complete spam sites. I don't think that applies to your site. There was a Panda update on September 27 that was not announced until a few days later. A lot of people who thought they were hit by EMD actually were affected by Panda. I didn't see any obvious Panda issues on a quick look though. (But please know I just took a quick look. It can take several hours of looking at analytics data to get an accurate picture.) Most Panda hit sites have pages and pages of duplicate or thin content, or if they're a small site are almost completely copied from another site. I would be surprised if Panda was the issue.

Is it possible that your drop happened on October 5, 2012? I think it's quite possible that Penguin is affecting your site. Penguin goes after sites who have artificially made backlinks with the intention of manipulating the search engine rankings. You don't have a lot of backlinks, but a lot of the ones that you do have are unnatural:

I've attached a screenshot that shows the decline in the # of the keywords the client had ranking in the top 20 in Google UK. In June 2012, the client had 46 keywords in the top 20 and by Oct 2012 , that number had dropped to just 4 keywords so it does indicate some kind of a penalty.

You can go to http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/ and take a quiz to determine if your site was hit by Panda or Penguin. This site is owned by Marine Haynes a moz.com member who has written a lot about penalized sites. You can see her youmoz posts here and writings around the web on penalized sites here.

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